Introducing SLARS-BCG-1: Sri Lanka's First School-Made CubeSat Project – Seeking Community Advice!

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Hi everyone in the Libre Space Foundation community!

We are the SLARS Team (Student-led Advanced Research in Space), a passionate group of student developers and space enthusiasts based in Sri Lanka. We are currently working on an incredibly exciting milestone: SLARS-BCG-1, Sri Lanka’s first school-built CubeSat project!

Our vision is to make space research and satellite data open and accessible for students across our region. We’ve even been exploring the concept of a dedicated Research Hub to eventually crowdsource and analyze satellite data, keeping everything deeply rooted in the spirit of collaborative, open learning.

:satellite: Current Progress

We have officially transitioned from the drawing board to the physical lab! Our current focus is hardware bring-up. So far, we have:

  • Assembled our initial development boards and core components on the bench.

  • Begun the process of powering up, debugging, and flashing bootloaders to our subsystems.

  • Started verifying basic power distribution and initial microcontroller functionality.

  • Continued development on a prototype web framework/research hub to manage future data and community-driven space analysis.

:handshake: Where We Need Your Help

Because we are a school-level team tackling a full CubeSat project and are currently in the thick of hardware bring-up, we are running into the typical hurdles that come with limited aerospace hardware experience. We are huge fans of LSF’s open-source philosophy and would love to get your guidance on a few things:

  1. Hardware Bring-up & Debugging Best Practices: What are some common pitfalls or “gotchas” we should look out for while bringing up our initial CubeSat boards? Are there open-source debugging tools or workflows the community recommends?

  2. Open-Source Comms Integration: We want to align our design with open-source standards. What are your recommendations for reliable, beginner-friendly UHF/S-band communication modules (like SatNOGS-compatible hardware) that interface well with a custom hardware stack?

  3. Telemetry & Ground Stations: How can we best prepare our satellite’s firmware and transmission systems during this early stage to easily integrate with the SatNOGS global network once we are in orbit?

We are eager to learn from the experts here, and we intend to document our journey openly so other student teams around the world can follow in our footsteps.

Thank you so much for your time and for maintaining such an inspiring community!

Best regards,

SLARS Team,
Sri Lanka

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Request for Final Support – SLARS-BCG-1 Student CubeSat Project
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Hello @slars2012 ,

I’m going to ping some person that i believe can have a look to the different topics you have and will be able to give you detailed answer about. It is just to ensure that they are going to see this message :slight_smile:

Hardware Bring-up & Debugging Best Practices

and

Open-Source Comms Integration

I believe @surligas , @sdoukos , @pierros , @aris12 , … all the ppl that worked on LSF missions/comms can have a look at your writing and answering you.

Telemetry & Ground Stations

For this matter. Regarding the sat firmware and tx system matters, i would say the same person as above. And for the Integration part, well i would say @fredy our head of operations ^^ to give you the big picture, i will also provide more details about the decoding and dashboard parts.

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Pinging also @dbita and dbita and @nickstouras :slight_smile:

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